What's the difference between overhear and overheard?

Overhear


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To hear more of (anything) than was intended to be heard; to hear by accident or artifice.
  • (v. t.) To hear again.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) I remember his name being whispered by my uncles for fear I would overhear.
  • (2) Or the afternoon I was standing outside a hotel room awaiting a private audience with Martin Scorsese, only to overhear him complaining that he had done enough interviews for one day.
  • (3) One of her favourites is overhearing a colleague saying: "You can't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die."
  • (4) Women had complained of harassment ranging from being groped in the office and told to sit on their bosses’ laps if they wanted a Christmas bonus, to being forced to overhear male colleagues ranking new female recruits based on their sexual attractiveness.
  • (5) Overhearing my family say negative comments about other LGBT people made me censor myself in their presence, lest they discover that I was too.
  • (6) I overhear two parties from Essex reacquainting themselves, the afternoon after the early hours before.
  • (7) He describes overhearing Gates discussing ways to dilute his stake in the firm and says he burst into the room, shouting, "This is unbelievable!
  • (8) The top OIC and the overhearing battle captain informed me that they didn't need or want to know this information anymore.
  • (9) It's just like overhearing a friend at a party talking quietly to someone else, saying something completely different from what they had just spent an hour talking to you about.
  • (10) It was charged as burglary, but I remember overhearing a conversation between his dad and the solicitor standing outside: "Why is this not just shoplifting?
  • (11) Just as I once delighted in overhearing an American fashion journalist in Paris go nuclear down the phone at her poor assistant in New York for shipping over the wrong Balenciaga ankle boots, so I was pleased to eavesdrop on one particular English tabloid sports writer scream down his phone at his desk assistant in London to find a direct flight to Recife "or I'll go fucking ballistic".
  • (12) It’s a conversation that millions of Pratchett fans would ache to overhear.
  • (13) Overhearing Amir's comments, Parisa, 24, and her boyfriend, Mohammad, 25, erupt into an argument.
  • (14) Returning to uni after a three-month stint working shifts at a fish factory, I was shocked to walk through campus and overhear tales of leisurely trips to South America and South-East Asia.” Ramsden adds: “Apart from my small group of friends, who all spent the summer working to fund their university living, it seemed like everyone around me came from a background completely alien to me.” Tom Dixon, a sabbatical officer at the University of Leeds who receives a maintenance loan for his politics degree, says: “I’ve spent my entire life watching people who are less deserving being handed things on a plate just because of what they were born into.
  • (15) In Sense and Sensibility Elinor overhears Willoughby discussing the gift of a horse with her sister and saying, "Marianne, the horse is still yours."
  • (16) I feel uncomfortable being in the City or Canary Wharf,” he says, “and overhearing conversations in coffee shops and wine bars.” He finds “the certainty, the self-confidence, the reluctance to open up to alternative views” depressing.
  • (17) When you overhear them in the corridor discussing something they learned in your lesson, when you see their interests and talents bloom as a result of the input you have been able to give.
  • (18) She must be really good at giving the editor head Seeing yourself discussed online is like overhearing someone talking about you while you’re changing in the school locker room: you’re trapped, you have to stay and listen but you do it with this horrible, growing nausea.
  • (19) Don't worry," says a passer-by overhearing the conversation.
  • (20) "A Bunny's Tale" takes the form of a diary and moves from Steinem's initial decision to adopt the alias of Marie Catherine Ochs to her last day on the job when she overhears another Bunny say of a customer, "He's a real gentleman.

Overheard


Definition:

  • (imp. & p. p.) of Overhear

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Those who overheard, McLaren remembers, clustered round afterwards and pressed the idea on him; and coincidentally, the very next day, as the idea was taking root, he went to a New Statesman lunch, fell to discussing the mayor, and ended up leaving with a commission to write his own manifesto, which the NS published last week.
  • (2) He dismissed the more damaging rumours circulating that week that he had been overheard suggesting that he toned down his conference speech because he did not want to be perceived as challenging Gordon Brown.
  • (3) In contrast, the Kingfisher team works in one small room so that all information gathered is instantly shared: “We even want our phone calls overheard by the rest of the team,” says MacInnes, “because we’ve realised the power of sharing even the smallest piece of information with the rest of the team.
  • (4) The other people in the carriage had overheard her side of the conversation and started, spontaneously, to pray.
  • (5) Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter Dutton overheard joking with Tony Abbott about rising sea levels – link to video “If there’s one thing that should be remembered about Peter Dutton’s week, it’s that this is the week that he masterminded the plan to bring 12,000 needy people to this country,” Abbott said in Canberra.
  • (6) With Huck Finn , he could recall life on America's great river as a permanent thing, a place of menacing sunsets, starlit nights and strange dawns, of the confessions of dying men, hints of buried treasure, murderous family feuds, overheard shoptalk, the crazy braggadocio of travelling showmen, the distant thunder of the civil war, and two American exiles, Huck the orphan and Jim the runaway slave, floating down the immensity of the great Mississippi.
  • (7) Previous research on the persuasive impact of an overheard audience has yielded conflicting results.
  • (8) While waiting to register, she overheard a conversation between two older students about Proust that confirmed her arrival in a world in which she would be more comfortable.
  • (9) The dominance of the referendum explains why a relieved Cameron told the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an overheard conversation days after the referendum, that the Queen had “ purred down the line ” when he told her the result.
  • (10) Subjects listened to an audiotaped persuasive message that conveyed arguments of either high or low quality and that was responded to by either an enthusiastic or an unenthusiastic overheard audience.
  • (11) Rotblat overheard the military director of the Manhattan Project, Lieutenant General Richard Groves, say at a wartime dinner party: "You realise of course that the main purpose of this project is to subdue the Russkies."
  • (12) I have no problems with the black people' Orlando Torres As his agonising wait for rescue continued, Torres overheard further strange exchanges.
  • (13) "The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists' questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, cancelled films – that thought is a nightmare.
  • (14) Behind me, a couple of dozen readers, poring over ancient maps and documents, have overheard my outrageous request and have raised their eyes to just over the rim of their spectacles.
  • (15) He was sitting in a cafe, telling a friend how he’d recently met two Silicon Valley power couples, each with a profoundly autistic child, when a teacher at the next table overheard and butted in: “There’s an epidemic of autism in Silicon Valley.
  • (16) Investigators turned their attention to Mouadan after one of the survivors of the Bataclan massacre said he had overheard one of the attackers – Ismaël Omar Mostefaï – refer to a man called Souleymane.
  • (17) Journalists from Sky News and BBC News overheard the discussions in the whips office about Labour MPs starting to complain online.
  • (18) While Lego was universally popular, the girls were drawn towards Lego Friends (though at least one mum was overheard explaining that all the other Lego was for girls too) and the boys towards Lego Star Wars.
  • (19) But he had been brought up in Cliveden and London against a background of Cabinet Ministers, diplomats and intellectuals constantly arguing and explaining events: as other children played nursery games, he overheard statesmen and politicians, playing the world's game of high diplomacy.
  • (20) In experiment 2, both the initial outcome manipulation and subsequent debriefing were watched and overheard by observers.

Words possibly related to "overhear"

Words possibly related to "overheard"